Page images
PDF
EPUB

But in their joyous calm abodes
The recompense of justice they receive,
And in the fellowship of gods.

Without a tear eternal ages live;

While, banished by the Fates from joy and rest,
Intolerable woes the impious soul molest.

ANTISTROPHE IV

But they who, in true virtue strong,
The third purgation can endure,1
And keep their minds from fraudful wrong
And guilt's contagion pure,

They through the starry paths of Jove
To Saturn's blissful seat remove;
Where fragrant breezes, vernal airs,
Sweet children of the main,

Purge the blest island from corroding cares,
And fan the bosom of each verdant plain;
Where fertile soil immortal fruitage bears,

Trees, from whose flaming branches flow,
Arrayed in golden bloom, refulgent beams;
And flowers, of golden hue, that blow
On the fresh borders of their parent streams :
These, by the blest in solemn triumph worn,
Their unpolluted hands and clustering locks adorn.

EPODE IV

Such is the righteous will, the high behest,
Of Rhadamanthus, ruler of the blest;

The just assessor of the throne divine,

On which, high raised above all gods, recline,
Linked in the golden bands of wedded love,
The great progenitors of thundering Jove.
There, in the number of the blessed enrolled,
Live Cadmus, Peleus, heroes famed of old,
And young Achilles, to those isles removed,
Soon as, by Thetis won, relenting Jove approved.

1 Literally: "Those who have had the courage to remain steadfast thrice in each life."

CHAPTER X

PHILOSOPHICAL ENGLISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: INFLUENCE OF DEISM, NATURE-WORSHIP, LIBERTY, AND THE ARTS.

POPE'S ESSAY ON MAN; Edward YounG; JAMES THOMSON ; MARK AKENSIDE; AND THEIR IMITATORS

HITHERTO English Poetry, as far as I have followed it in the different schools of the eighteenth century, has offered a lively image, in its satiric and familiar verse, of the corporate activity of the State. The civil conflict of a hundred years was closed by the Revolution of 1688. In every department of life the result of that Revolution was a compromise. There was compromise in the balance struck between Crown and Parliament. While, on the one side, Parliament destroyed the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, on the other, it left the prerogative untouched, and maintained the continuity of the ancient monarchical order, by fixing the succession to the throne in a branch of the legitimate dynasty.

There was compromise in the relations of Church and State. The Whig policy, as represented by Walpole, secured religious liberty, but guaranteed the ascendency of the National Church. When the Dissenters, who had done so much for the great Whig Minister, approached him with anxious inquiries as to when they might hope to be relieved of their political disabilities, he bluntly replied: "Never!" At the same time the High section of the Church was depressed, and the management of Church ascendency was left in the hands. of the Latitudinarian, or Left Wing of the Episcopal body.

There was an analogous compromise in the sphere of Taste and Criticism. It was the aim of Addison to strike a mean between the principles of Charles II.'s Court and the ecclesiastical tyranny of the Puritans; to form a standard of social conversation which should be gay without being irreligious, and witty without being indecent.

Under these conditions the spirit of the Classical Renaissance gradually asserted its superiority in English poetry over the Feudal and Ecclesiastical traditions which had struggled so hard for victory through the greater part of the seventeenth century. The Renaissance → conquered in England, not by the adoption of formal rules of imitation, but by allying itself with dominant tendencies in the national life, and by developing an instrument of metrical expression which had been naturalised in the language since the time of Chaucer.

Compromises have no finality. The Revolution settlement served as a modus vivendi, but it did not satisfy all the needs of the imagination. Walpole's régime gave the country the breathing-space it required to establish the new order. As Young said of it :

When I survey the blessings of our isle,
Her arts triumphant in the royal smile,

Her public wounds bound up, her credit high,
Her commerce spreading sails in every sky,
The pleasing scene recalls my theme again,
And shows the madness of ambitious men,

Who, fond of bloodshed, draw the murdering sword,
And burn to give mankind a single lord.1

Nevertheless the predominance of the moneyed classes, on whose support Walpole mainly relied, led to materialistic principles of public policy, and to the vast increase of Parliamentary corruption. In Church and State the suppression of Roman Catholics, Nonjurors, and Dissenters, thrust out of the sphere of social action many spiritual aspirations which were forced to find an outlet 1 Love of Fame: Satire vii. 21-28.

VOL. V

T

through irregular channels. And, in the same way, the reaction in poetry against all forms of mediævalism confined the imagination too strictly within ethical and satirical limits, to the exclusion of those lyrical impulses which had once found natural and simple modes of expression.

The time has now come for tracing the gradual uprising of these suppressed forces against the dominant Compromise. Through the reigns of George II. and George III., three distinct imaginative movements may be observed to agitate the surface of the prevailing Whiggism; and at the same time the poets who are affected by them are seen to be seeking, as their vehicles of expression, blank verse or other kinds of English metre, in preference to the heroic couplet, which has hitherto maintained an undisputed supremacy. The tendencies in question are the Deistical Movement, the Methodist Movement, and the Antiquarian and Esthetic Movement, in which the Romantic Revolution of the last part of the century had its first beginnings. As all of these in various ways. affected profoundly the course of English poetry, I shall consider them here in the order I have named.

The Deists are first spoken of as a distinct body of religious thinkers about the middle of the sixteenth century. Professing to believe in a personal God, they excluded from their worship the person of Christ, and while insisting on the obligations of Natural Religion, rejected the authority of Revelation. Their doctrines were the intelligible (though not logical) sequel of the Reforming movement in religion. As the Church of Geneva had shaken off the traditions of Rome, as the Anabaptists had freed themselves from the restraints imposed by Calvin, so the Deists imagined themselves to have advanced a further step along the path of liberty by repudiating the authority of Scripture. They themselves were divided from each other by shades and sections of belief. The earliest of English Deists, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a man evidently of a sincerely pious. temper, reduced universal religion to five articles of belief : (1) That there is one supreme God; (2) That He is chiefly to be worshipped; (3) That piety and virtue is

the principal part of His worship; (4) That we must repent of our sins, and, if we do so, God will pardon them; (5) That there are rewards for good men, and punishments for bad men in a future state.1 There was nothing in these articles directly opposed to Christian tenets, nor did Lord Herbert show any antagonism to Christianity, except in considering it a "particular," as contrasted with the "universal" religion. But those who followed him showed themselves less anxious to propagate the religion of Nature than to subvert the authority of Revelation. They were by no means agreed in accepting Lord Herbert's fifth article; on the other hand, they were united in a common attempt to undermine on different sides the supernatural foundations of the Christian Faith. Some of them, like Shaftesbury, adopting one of the first principles of Hobbes, insisted that established religion was only to be accepted as the work of the Civil Power. Some, sheltering themselves under the name, while seeking to abolish the thing, tried to prove either, with Collins, that the foundations of Christianity were solely allegorical; with Toland, that "Christianity is not mysterious"; or, with Tindal, that "Christianity is as old as Creation." Others, particularly Morgan and Chubb, spoke highly of the moral doctrines of Christianity, but sought to show, in company with Woolston, a scandalous buffoon, that the miracles, which were supposed to attest the divine origin of the Christian Revelation, were unworthy of credit. The most virulently aggressive of all the Deists in his attacks on Christianity was Lord Bolingbroke, whose main position has been justly summed up in the following proposition, "That from the clearness and sufficiency of the law of nature, it may be concluded that God hath made no other revelation of His will to mankind; and that there is no need for any extraordinary supernatural revelation." 2

The first didactic poem in English which immediately derives its inspiration from the Deistic movement is Pope's

1 Leland's Fiew of the Deistical Writers that have appeared in England in the Last and Present Century (Fourth Edition, 1764), p. 4.

2 Ibid. p. 383.

« PreviousContinue »